The R-Word Is Even Worse Than You Think

Suzan Shown Harjo is president of The Morning Star Institute, a national Native rights organization, as well as a columnist for Indian Country Today Media Network, poet, curator and founder of the National Museum of the American Indian.

The name of the National Football League team in Washington, D.C., is the worst word that is used about us in the English language. And I do mean worst.

It harks back to the days when colonies, trade companies and some states issued bounty proclamations for exterminating Native American people and providing the bloody “red skins” as proof of “Indian kill.” In 1863, for example, the Daily Republican in Winona, Minn., carried the following notice: “The State reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth.” And it could be even more horrifying: When such bounties were offered on a sliding scale of payments, depending on whether the dead were men, women or children, the notices often used the term “scalps” when they in fact meant the victims’ genitalia. That was the only way to truly distinguish the gender and maturity of the skinned corpse. Many times the killers reserved the term “top-knot” for an actual scalp of a head with hair.

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The heinous origins and history of the D.C. team’s name should tell you why the overwhelming majority of Native American peoples support litigation against the Washington franchise – and why our fight is far from over. Last week, in a historic decision, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board canceled the Washington team’s trademarks, pending appeals. The TTAB held that the six trademark licenses issued to Pro Football, Inc. between 1967 and 1990 were “disparaging” to a “substantial composite” of Native American people. That was the second time the TTAB – the expert judges on trademark law – ruled against the team’s name; the first was in 1999 in Harjo et al v. Pro Football, Inc.

I am the Harjo of that case, a proud 69-year-old Cheyenne and Muscogee grandmother from Oklahoma. I have been fighting against the racist slurs in D.C. ever since my husband and I went to our first and last Washington football game in 1974, and the fans around us began touching and tugging our hair and using the R-word to tell their friends about us. When I was executive director of the National Congress of American Indians in the 1980s, I worked with lawyers to find a way to try to get rid of the disgusting name and disembodied head of the Washington team.

It has taken us a long and tangled legal trail to get to where we are now: With six other Native American plaintiffs, we first filed a lawsuit in 1992, won seven years later and spent the next 10 years defending the TTAB’s decision in the federal courts. We did not lose on the merits. The other side escaped through the loophole of laches, an obscure provision of the law that says that a given right or claim does not have to be enforced if there has been too long a delay in asserting it. The district court judge ruled that each of us had waited too long after turning 18 to bring suit.

In 2005, the appeals court sent a question back to the lower court: What about our youngest plaintiff, a Cochiti Pueblo painter and printmaker named Mateo Romero, who was actually a baby when the Washington franchise first received federal trademark protection in 1967? Had Romero somehow waited too long? It took the district judge three years to answer yes.

In the meantime, to avoid such a ruling in the future, I recruited Native young people between 18 and 24 years old who couldn’t be accused of having waited too long to sue. In 2006, they brought Blackhorse et al. v. Pro Football, Inc., before the Patent and Trademark Office. The PTO accepted the case, but held it in abeyance, pending the outcome of the Harjo case, which ended in 2009 when the Supreme Court declined to review it. Now, finally, they have ruled in our favor.

And we are just getting started. We will not give up, no matter what future rulings say. We intend to change not only the Washington team’s name, but the names of other sports franchises that treat us as mascots or relics —as if we had died out as a people long ago. If Dan Snyder, the owner of the Washington football team, finally sees the light and agrees to drop his franchise’s despicable name, it will prove to be an important precedent in professional sports. We have already had tremendous success at the local and college level, where governing bodies are less concerned about dollars and more sensitive to their communities. Since 1970, when the University of Oklahoma retired its mascot “Little Red,” colleges and elementary, middle and high schools nationwide have dropped more than 2,000 such “Indian” stereotypes from their athletic programs. By our count that’s more than two-thirds of all such names, meaning we have a little more than 900 to go.

Some changes started with one Native student or family fighting a lonely battle, in places like Arvada, Colo., Asheville, N.C. and Cooperstown, N.Y. Others involved broader, more high-visibility efforts, as with the University of North Dakota, which eliminated “Fighting Sioux” last year – but only after a prolonged and bitter fight involving a statewide referendum and a lawsuit. In the mid-1990s, I worked with the Kentucky Education Department, teachers, coaches, principals, students and parents to change all the schools with “Indian” stereotypes in the two districts of Louisville, Ky. One high school had the same disparaging name as the Washington pro football team, and its logo was an offensive Al Capp cartoon character, “Lonesome E. Polecat.” Some team-name boosters were clinging to a permission letter from Capp as a way of keeping the R-word. Eventually, both the name and the image were removed.